Thursday, November 12, 2015

Minimum Wage

The Minimum Wage should not be raised. All illegal should be stopped and legal Immigration should be limited to 100,000 a year of the brightest folks on the planet.

When all of this started, the Minimum Wage jobs were filled by young people, to learn how to work for a living.  These are relatively easy jobs in retail in restaurants, fast food joints, dry goods stores, grocery stores, life guards, baby sitters, lawn mowers etc.  Kids from 14 to 18 normally did these jobs working part-time, after school. Now, most of these jobs are held by immigrants.

The “more than minimum wage jobs” were typically reserved for HS grads over 18.  These were light assembly jobs, warehouse, cleaners, hotel maids and day shift retail. Now, most of these jobs are held by immigrants.

Lots of folks went to tech schools to learn how to fix shoes, cut hair and fix cars. There were plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, carpenters, painters, floor guys, drywall guys, etc.

We always had seasonal migrant workers doing agricultural work at harvest, but young people also did this work on their own family farms before and after school.

There were plenty of jobs for everybody. Then we opened up immigration to all other jobs, so they came legally and illegally by the millions a year

When manufacturing started moving off-shore, the manufacturing jobs moved with them.  We have 100,000 fewer manufacturing operation in the US than we had in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, the PC started a resurgence in electronics manufacturing, but that only lasted until 2000. The passage of NAFTA in 1993 heralded the exodus and by 2000, many of these manufacturing jobs were gone. The federal government refused to close the border, gave out too many visas and lost track of these folks. Immigrants streamed in at the rate of 2 million to 3 million a year for the last 25 years.

Now we are looking at taking unlimited numbers of immigrants from the TPP countries and our open borders immigration policy. In the meantime we have 102 million working age citizens without jobs. We are also looking at unlimited numbers of Muslim refugees and terrorists being brought to the US by the UN and the federal government.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader


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